Best Practices for a Better Email Sender Reputation

Studies have proved that one of the best ways for brands to reach out to their customers and engage with them is through email marketing. This holds true for a mature audience as well as a young, tech-savvy audience.

That said, no email campaign can be successful if your emails do not reach the intended recipients. This is where your reputation as a sender becomes important. If you don’t have a good sender reputation, email service providers may divert your emails to the spam inbox. You may even be subject to fines. So, let’s take a look at the factors influencing your sender reputation and how you can improve it.

What Gives You A Poor Sender Reputation?

The key reasons why you may get a low sender reputation score are:

• Recipients often mark your emails as spam
• Not enough recipients open your emails
• High bounce rate or a high number of emails sent to invalid email accounts consistently
• High un-subscription rates

At the crux of these factors lies a reliance on bad data. Think about it – would a person who signed up to receive emails from you mark them as spam? No – this typically happens when information in your database is outdated. For example, if a subscriber signed on to a newsletter with a work email address and later left that job, any email sent to that address would bounce. The good news is that there’s plenty you can do to improve your sender reputation.

Simple Steps To Improve Sender Reputation

The first step to improving your sender reputation is, understanding where you stand. To do this, you should conduct an IP reputation check. IP reputation is typically scored between 0 and 100 with 100 being the highest. Your reputation should ideally be above 70. If it is below 70, here are a few things you can do.

• Verify email addresses before they enter the system

Given how poor data can damage your sender reputation, the first step towards improving it is to clean your email database. For this, you must first ensure that all email addresses being added to the database are complete and valid. There are a number of email verification tools that can help with this task.

They can help identify incomplete email addresses or those with incorrect syntax and make corrections to them. For example, if a person enters his email address as ajay@gmial.com, the verification tool will correct it to ajay@gmail.com. Also, avoid buying or renting email address lists for your marketing campaigns. Similarly, you may want to avoid adding official work email addresses to your mailing lists.

• Keep the database clean

In addition to verifying new entries to your database, you must also monitor the health of your database from time to time. Email addresses should be checked for their validity regularly. You need to check that the email addresses listed are complete, correct and still in use. If you were to do this manually, it would take a lot of time and may additionally inconvenience your customers. Email verification tools conduct this validation without the need for manual inputs from the customer and are much quicker.  Database cleaning should not be a one-time affair but an ongoing process.

• Use segmented email lists

Customers often mark emails as spam or unsubscribe from mailing lists when the content of the emails do not interest them. Given that you probably offer more than one service, customers have unique reasons for signing up for your emails. To ensure that your emails contain information that will interest your customers, avoid using a single long list but use shorter, segmented lists. This makes it easier to match relevant content to your customer’s needs and preferences. For example, you may segment a mailing list according to the recipient’s location, age, their past purchases, etc.

• Personalize the subject line

Personalizing the subject line of your emails can increase open rates by as much as 50%. This is one of the simplest steps that can get your message delivered and help boost your sender reputation. Instead of using a generic subject line, use it as an extension of your salutation and make sure you mention the recipient’s name in the subject line.

In Conclusion

Emails are a powerful means of marketing your products and services. By protecting your sender reputation, you can maximize the results from an email marketing campaign. With the right tools, you can ensure that your emails reach the right people, without getting pushed into the spam folders or filters. Further, you can ensure that they contain information that is relevant and adds value to your customers so that your audience looks forward to your emails and engages with them.

Finally, use an email verification tool to check your subscriber list before sending any messages. This kind of tool will help you remove invalid addresses from your list, which helps to preserve your IP reputation.